This invention relates to establishing an electrical connection between two substrates or printed circuit boards.
Modern electronics often contain circuitry formed on a plurality of stacked layers/boards, e.g. between two parallel printed circuit boards (PCB), between two parallel substrates with patterned metallization, between a multi-element antenna array and an interconnection board, or between two layers of a microwave module or integrated circuit. Where multiple stacked surfaces are used, there exists a need to provide electrical interconnections and for some applications a resilient electrical interconnection is advantageous where the distances between the surfaces may change or may not be uniform. One approach for coupling electrical signals is to use a solderball between the respective conductive pads on the two adjacent layers. In another approach, a fuzz button can be placed between the two adjacent layers. However, fuzz buttons are normally time-consuming and/or tedious to install. Solder bumps require subsequent heating and if several such connections are required, uneven heating or differences in characteristics among the solder bumps may yield unreliable or inconsistent connections. The solder balls or fuzz buttons are additional parts that must be attached to the layers of the circuit and increase the “touch labor”. The disassembly of layers connected using either of these techniques for maintenance or repair of the circuitry may result in even greater difficulties where such interconnections are required to be manually reestablished during reassembly of the respective layers. Additionally, the minimum practical size of fuzz buttons may negatively impact the performance of RF circuits above a frequency, e.g. above 20 GHz. Thus, there exists a need for an improved resilient interconnector that minimizes such difficulties.